-----Original Message----- From: Thomas B. Passin [mailto:tpassin@mitretek.org] Sent: Thursday, October 28, 1999 10:53 AM To: zope@zope.org Subject: Re: [Zope] RE: Confera reply error

Thanks, Cayce. This bug is gone in version 1.3.2, as you said.

Now, Confera-people, can we get some wild-card action for searches?

This is a vastly harder problem than it sounds. Basicly, there's no good speed/space tradeoff in indexes to get this done well. You can't simply regular-expression search through the index because this would require looking at every single word in the index, which could take a looooong time. To give you an example, htdig is probaby the most popular indexing engine in the open source world. It doesn't even do wildcard searching, the best it can do is 'substring' searching, and it has this to say about it: substring Matches all words containing the queries as substrings. Since this requires checking every word in the database, this can really slow down searches considerably. Due to the complexity of this problem, I don't know of any open source indexer that does this. There is a particularly interesting algorithm called 'n-grams' that will let you do simple 'globbing' (DOS style wildcards) but it does have an additional space requirement in the index. -Michel